Ordinarily, I’d just chalk Rosen’s intelligence being put in a negative light as pre-draft nonsense, but this is just a small part of a larger trend in the NFL, where analytics are mocked and new trends at the lower levels of the sport are sparingly, and only begrudgingly, adopted.

As other professional sports leagues dove head-first into analytics, football willingly stayed back in the time before the math nerds infiltrated sports. Those nerds are a threat to the Football Guys, and Football Guys still have a stranglehold on the sport that they don’t want to lose.

In baseball, we know how fast and at what angle Giancarlo Stanton’s latest home run travelled. In the NBA, fans can look up Steph Curry’s shooting percentage after three dribbles. Meanwhile in the NFL, the quarterback version of a basketball shot chart is considered “NextGen”…

In other sports, like basketball for instance, strategic innovations are developed at the NBA level and then trickle down to college and then, eventually, high school. In football, it’s the reverse. High school and colleges coaches are advancing the game from a strategic standpoint while pro coaches lag years behind. The Eagles’ use of RPO’s was a big story leading up to the Super Bowl. College teams had been running RPO’s for over a decade before they “revolutionized” the league.

As Rosen will soon find out, it’s tough being smart and having new ideas in the NFL. Just ask Sashi Brown, the former Browns GM who, using unorthodox methods, acquired a treasure trove of roster building assets but was fired before he got to put them to use after losing a power struggle with Hue Jackson. Brown did his job and set the franchise up for the long haul, but he’s the outsider, so Jackson, who couldn’t get a single win out of a roster that wasn’t 0-16 bad, got to stay and ruin the Browns for another year.

Rosen is widely considered the most polished quarterback prospect in this draft, but Sam Darnold and Josh Allen are thought to be ahead of him on most team’s big boards.

Asked a handful of NFL scouts and execs who the #Giants draft if Josh Allen goes first overall.

Because most NFL coaches think like Jim Mora Jr. They don’t take kindly to “why?” To ask “why?” is to not just blindly accept. “Why?” is a challenge to a coach’s precious system.

We do it this way because I said so and it’s the way we’ve always done it.

That’s why NFL teams are no better at drafting than they were decades ago. It’s why Josh Allen and his rocket arm will probably go first in the 2018 NFL draft despite all the evidence suggesting he’ll a bust. It’s why NFL coaches are proud of their ridiculously long play-calls and scoff at more efficient play-calling systems at lower levels.

Why are teams still so bad at drafting despite technological advancements and an increase in scouting resources? Why are teams still falling for big-armed quarterbacks with subpar film? Why do we need 20-word play calls when five words will suffice?

The NFL has no answers.

There aren’t enough Josh Rosens asking “why?” so the league as a whole — from the execs running teams to the coaches running the locker rooms — is slow to learn from past mistakes and to evolve — to evolve past a point where a prospect’s intelligence and desire to learn is seen as a bad thing.

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